Non-Bible Word Study?
Is there a tool/guide that is best for researching Greek words that do NOT occur in the Bible? I have in mind something extremely similar to the Bible Word Study guide that Logos uses, but perhaps stripped down so it just has the sections for lemma, root, and textual searches?
Some background to my question -- I am researching some Greek terms not found in the Bible and discovered I cannot paste them into the Bible Word Study guide in Logos (well, I can paste them, but Logos does not recognize them as valid and will not do anything with them). An example of one such word is ἡρῷος. I would like to get a quick overview of which lexicons in my library have entries for these words and then be able to search Greek classics for them. Yes, I know I can make a collection of Greek lexicons and run a generic search focusing on heading text and large text, but this is an imperfect solution. As an example of why, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon hyphenates some of its entries. The word ἠριπόλη is listed as ἠρι-πόλη, and therefore a search for the headword ἠριπόλη will miss this lexicon completely when displaying results. I currently only have Logos installed, but if Noet has any better tools/guides for studying words that do not occur in the Bible, I would install it just for that. Or does Logos already have this ability and I am just missing something? Apologies if this is posted in the wrong forum - I wasn't sure if it would better be filed as a Logos question or a Noet question.
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Matthew said:
An example of one such word is ἡρῷος. I would like to get a quick overview of which lexicons in my library have entries for these words and then be able to search Greek classics for them.
You can bring up the BWS for non-Bible words from the context menu of a source text. Like this:
You get this:
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Mark, thanks for the tip. That strikes me as really odd that the guide will display if pulled up using that method but not if you direclctly type or paste the word into the guide. It seems like that should be an easy thing to fix, and something that would help meet the needs of the target audience for Noet, as they will more regularly be working with words not found in the biblical text. The solution you presented is still in a sense a half-measure, as that presupposes you have already located the word in a text that has been tagged. If a non-bible word is located in a non-tagged text, you would have to select the word, copy it, open a search tab, run the appropriate search, locate a tagged text with the word in question, right-click it, and launch the word study. Seems like it would be a lot more straightforward to just type or paste the word directly into the guide if Faithlife were to enable that functionality
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Would Perseus help?
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Matthew said:
That strikes me as really odd that the guide will display if pulled up using that method but not if you direclctly type or paste the word into the guide. It seems like that should be an easy thing to fix, and something that would help meet the needs of the target audience for Noet, as they will more regularly be working with words not found in the biblical text.
I agree that it's odd, to say the least. Can you confirm that's still the case in the Noet application (rather than in the Logos application)? I'm not running Noet, but if that behaviour persisted there, I'd call it a bug.
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Steve Maling said:
Would Perseus help?
I do not believe so. The issue (at this point) is that the Bible Word Study guide will not accept non-bible words that are typed or pasted into it, but it accepts those same words if the guide is accessed via the right-click menu when the words occur in a tagged text
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Mark Barnes said:
Can you confirm that's still the case in the Noet application (rather than in the Logos application)?
Not at this time. Like you, I only have Logoa installed
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RE: The oddity. The reason the BWS will run from right click in cases where it won't run from the guide input box is that the guide runs not on lemmas but on a more narrowly-constructed thing called a lemma data type reference which, in addition to the raw characters, includes an identifier for the lexicographical analysis to which the lemma belongs, and homograph numbers (if any). Guessing at these references is difficult-to-impossible, so one needs to either pick one already made from a text or from a list. The BWS guide auto-suggests against a prepared list of lemmas which comes from the "DB:LEMMAS" dataset resource (listed in Help > About), which at the moment may not does not contain every lemma in every text.
(Prior to 6.2, there were multiple lemma lists, one per language, analysis, and corpus. BWS uses one of them to create suggestions. Post 6.2, there is one lemma list, which gives suggestions from all analyses and corpora.)
Noet behaves the same as Logos and Verbum in this respect.
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Eli Evans said:
Guessing at these references is difficult-to-impossible
Hm.
Greek characters point to Greek, Hebrew-ish characters to Hebrew? (must be different number ranges in Unicode, comparable to separating lowercase/uppercase alpha-characters in Ascii?)
Assume there is no homograph - and when the guess-lookup turns up two possible hits give both to choose from?
If all lemma-data-type-references are in a list, it should not be impossible to match input against it.
Have joy in the Lord!
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NB.Mick said:
Assume there is no homograph - and when the guess-lookup turns up two possible hits give both to choose from?
The point is that if the word isn't in the lemma list then it's not possible to disambiguate homographs. Logos wouldn't even know there were two possible hits.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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NB.Mick said:Eli Evans said:
Guessing at these references is difficult-to-impossible
Hm.
Greek characters point to Greek, Hebrew-ish characters to Hebrew? (must be different number ranges in Unicode, comparable to separating lowercase/uppercase alpha-characters in Ascii?)
Assume there is no homograph - and when the guess-lookup turns up two possible hits give both to choose from?
If all lemma-data-type-references are in a list, it should not be impossible to match input against it.
Yes, that's pretty much how the auto-complete works. My point was that the "everything in one list" to pick from doesn't exist yet. Rather, as of 6.2, the list exists, but we haven't put every possible lemma into it yet. (I talked to Rick and he says they're in the process of adding more items to the list. No specific plans to include all of Perseus.)
The part that's impossible to guess is the correct homograph for the meaning you want according to the analysis the lemma belongs to. When it comes to homographs, each analysis splits the baby a different way (this is especially a problem in Hebrew (because Hebrew is especially a problem [;)])). And the analysis identifiers. Also, weird things like how AFAT doesn't have vowel points but LHB and Westminster do; or how Friberg and Swanson analyses use middle passive forms for lots of words instead of nominative accusative, and ... there's just lots of little gotcha stuff that's hard to guess correctly every time.
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It seems there must be two lists (or however they are represented), an incomplete one with lemmas, and one with the lemma-datatype-references that actually work. Maybe the lookup just picks the wrong one. [Edit: Eli, I was responding to Mark while you posted - thanks for the explanation and disregard this sentence]
On another note: afaik, even though there are homographs in many languages (words with different meanings and same writing, like 'bank' in English), I've seen the disambiguating number only for Hebrew, not for Greek - which should make it easier to 'just run it' for Greek. Probably we don't have much extrabiblical Hebrew words in Logos - as opposed to Greek, where Perseus and the Noet offerings flood basically everything that ever was written in Greek (well, before 1000 AD or so) into Logos and the problem is much larger.
Have joy in the Lord!
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Yep. In my experience, Greek lexicons use homograph distinctions <1% of the time, and most morph analyses ignore them altogether. On the other hand, upwards of 40% of Hebrew lexicon entries are distinguished only by number -- depending on the lexicographer.
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Eli Evans said:
Noet behaves the same as Logos and Verbum in this respect.
Thank you fornthe explanation of the behavior I was seeing. You have answered my question and saved me the trouble of installing Noet to try something that would not have worked anyway. The BWS guide seems so straightforward on the front end that I didn't even consider the complexities behind the scenes, and that is the mark of a good product!
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